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Design

A Rainbow Stilt House Reimagines Urban Living

The maquette itself is a hyper explosion in architecture, pulling at the fringes of our imagination and traditional sense of house.
Images courtesy of Arne Quinze Studio

Part of being an artist involves casting new ideas that intervene in our daily routines. Belgian conceptual artist Arne Quinze, who in the past created giant satellite sculptures, crafted a maquette of a rainbow stilt house to be erected in metal and in real life at 137 feet high in Sao Paulo in 2016. The maquette itself is a hyper explosion in architecture, pulling at both the fringes of our imaginations and traditional sense of a home.

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Quinze says his experiments with stilt houses are symbolic gestures of the strength of mankind standing on two feet. In 2010, he constructed a 52-foot-high orange stilt house in the center of Beirut titled, The Visitor. He and his studio continue to renew the paint on this structure each year and hope to reinvigorate it with a wash of colors later this fall.

The artist is best-known for his large sculpture pieces that rethink plazas, markets, and other communal meeting points. His focus is on human connections and the spaces where people meet. In 2006, for example, he built a large wooden pavilion at Burning Man titled, Uchronia: A message from the future, and in 2008, The Sequence, an urban sculpture constructed over a Belgian street Rue de Louvain along the Flemish parliament.

Sao Paulo is a city long known for its traffic congestion and towering skyscrapers and Quinze’s Metal Stilthouse Sao Paulo maybe a welcome experiment in connecting city dwellers with new modes of stacked living. If anything, design-wise the metal stilt house works in welcome conversation with the ethos of the Octavio Frias de Oliveira Bridge, with a concrete X-shape reaching skyward and cables that illuminate with color at night.

Arne says that cities should be like open-air museums where art touches people in their everyday lives, in the places they congregate, live, and spend free time.

Click here to visit Arne Quinze's website.

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